Invisible Chains (12 page)

When Sarah arrived in Victoria, Henwood took away her wallet and identification before assaulting and threatening her when she tried to leave. Three weeks later, after Sarah's family had reported her missing, officers with the Victoria Police Service discovered her on the street. She was being sold for sex and giving her earnings to Henwood. Either because Henwood was an amateur exploiter or didn't have enough capital to cover the initial costs of hotel/motel rooms to keep Sarah hidden, she'd been seen by the police. Obviously underage, she'd provided the officers with two false names before breaking down and asking for help. Henwood was then located and charged with a long list of offences, including human trafficking.

Someone has requested to be your Facebook friend …

Sarah was not alone in befriending a stranger on Facebook. A survey by Microsoft Canada and Youthography revealed that one out of every three young people has accepted a friend request on Facebook from someone whom they didn't know, usually a “friend of a friend.” Another motive in accepting a request is to meet new people. Concerns have been raised about the presence of convicted sex offenders online, many of whom are prohibited from having physical contact with children but are active in the virtual world where an introduction to a child is just a click away.

In 2007, MySpace revealed that more than twenty-nine thousand registered sex offenders in the United States alone had profiles on their website. This revelation prompted the State of New York to pass the
Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act
(e-STOP) the following year, requiring all registered sex offenders in the state to disclose their internet accounts and identifiers. If an offender is convicted of a child sexual offence or used the internet to commit a sex crime, he is prohibited from joining social networking sites as a mandatory condition of probation or parole.

In December 2009, over three thousand five hundred convicted sex offenders in the State of New York were kicked off Facebook and
MySpace, drawing praise from the New York–based Crime Victims Center. Unfortunately, Canada has yet to enact similar laws to confront the problem.

Parry Aftab, founder and director of WiredSafety, which advises children on internet risks, explains that children who are already vulnerable to sexual exploitation face increased danger on the web. “They may post sexual images,” explains Aftab. “They may indicate that they're up for anything. They may indicate that they're more mature, and know a lot more things than anybody around them appreciates. And like a weak fish broadcasting to a shark, they broadcast their vulnerability to sexual predators, pimps, and sexual traffickers.”

Craigslist: A clearing house for victims

According to Katherine Chon, former executive director and cofounder of the Washington, D.C.–based Polaris Project, human traffickers have found Craigslist to be “one of the most efficient, effective, and free ways to post children and women for sale.”

After falling under the influence of a sex trafficking ring, girls as young as thirteen are advertised explicitly, offering to perform erotic services, overt sex acts, or unprotected sex. The ads claim the girls are eighteen or older but use barely coded language to get their message across to prospective customers. Racy pictures accompanying the notices may or may not be of the girls in question. An email address or phone number is posted for interested men to call, and a place and time is arranged for sex acts at agreed prices. This is e-commerce at its most efficient—in this context, horrific, disgusting, and growing rapidly in size and impact.

In June 2009, the North Vancouver RCMP released the following public warning as the school year ended: “Many of these at-risk youths have been recruited by a North Vancouver ring of pimps and drug traffickers. These girls are being exploited through the use of Craigslist to advertise their sexual services that are then arranged for hotels. The pimps are using violence or the threat of violence to control the girls.”

Police were alerted to the situation when staff at a North Vancouver school heard of students being sold for sex by former students, now gang members in their early twenties and allegedly involved in trafficking girls and drugs. Officers from the RCMP Youth Intervention Unit (YIU) and Sex Crime Investigations Units are working together to address the problem, along with ONYX, an organization that supports sexually exploited youth. It was the YIU that went public with the information in an effort to alert parents.

“Parents have to be really aware and educate themselves around the Internet and computers,” Officer Shannon Kitchen of the YIU explained. “That's a big one.” She's been involved in eleven files to date and has identified four suspected pimps, although she believes there are more. “I think that they're constantly working to increase their numbers.”

One teenage girl who represents herself as eighteen online, but whom Kitchen knows to be sixteen, was sold for “car dates” with a range of sexual services up to one hundred and twenty dollars. Some services are described as “uncovered,” or without a condom, exposing her to serious STDs, including HIV/AIDS.

Cyber cops: Policing sex trafficking online

From Vancouver to Calgary to the Greater Toronto Area, police officers are beginning to investigate numerous cases in which Craigslist has been used to facilitate sex acts with minors, as well as to sell domestic and foreign adult victims of human trafficking. Despite some successes, police are under-resourced and cannot make more than a dent in the problem.

In August 2007, the parents of a missing underage girl in British Columbia contacted police after somehow discovering she was being sold for sex hundreds of kilometres away on Craigslist's Calgary website. Fortunately, the Calgary Police Service, Vice Unit, was able to rescue her.

Also in 2007, the Calgary police launched an undercover investigation called “Operation Carmel” to determine whether Craigslist was
being used systematically for the illegal sale of minors and trafficking victims for sex. Over two years, the Vice Unit made more than thirty arrests related to criminal activity facilitated through Craigslist and rescued three underage girls being sold for sex on the website. In December 2008, undercover officers in the same city located two females in their late teens who'd been brought from Winnipeg to work as escorts. Their trafficker was posting their pictures and information on Craigslist to generate business. Fortunately, police were able to help these victims return to their homes in Manitoba.

A month later, Calgary police located another victim being sold for sex on Craigslist. The sex trafficker who controlled her was a known gang associate. This victim was rescued from a hotel room paid for by the criminal and returned to her home in Vancouver.

The “medium of choice” for human traffickers

“Operation Street Fighter,” a second major police investigation launched in Calgary in 2007, revealed “strong indications” of human trafficking and another Craigslist connection. Time and again, confidential informants directed police operatives to Craigslist as a conduit for Asian Organized Crime to advertise young girls who were providing sexual services for money and attracting customers to residential bawdy houses. The investigation found Craigslist to be “the medium of choice for the advertising of sexual services in exchange for money.”

Sergeant Mark Schwartz of the Calgary Police Service, Vice Unit, has since been qualified as an expert in court on the use of Craigslist for advertising sex acts. He describes how men wanting to buy sex are “cruising through the listings on Craigslist … similar to driving around in circles on a know[n] prostitution stroll, checking to see who is working, and then picking your favourite.”

The problem reached such epic proportions in the United States that in November 2008 Craigslist was forced to curb this illegal use of its website. It agreed to take a number of measures, including co-operating with law enforcement to investigate sex trafficking and
requiring phone and credit card verification for ads posted; the latter substantially reduced the ads in the “erotic services” section, along with the more explicit language.

Craigslist took further action in May 2009, but again only in the United States, to eliminate its “erotic services” section. In its place a new “adult services” section was created, with a requirement that a Craigslist employee manually review every ad to verify its compliance with the website's terms of use. In a 2009 interview about his company's role in sex trafficking, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said the extensive measures to crack down on criminal misuse of the Craigslist website do not fully apply to the nearly fifty Canadian sites owned by his company. He acknowledged, though, that the website “is just as popular in Canada.”

Cellphones: More technology to monitor and control victims

In recent years, the cellphone has emerged as the only new technology to rival the impact of the internet on our lives. Unfortunately, cellphones also provide human traffickers with a means to exert more control over their victims than might otherwise be possible.

Consider the system devised by twenty-one-year-old Vytautas Vilutis, a convicted human trafficker who posted his cellphone number on Craigslist so that men could arrange appointments for sex acts with his twenty-year-old Canadian victim. In this way, he kept track of who was coming and going and used this information to calculate how much the victim owed him. Vilutis would even text his victim when a man's time was up.

The irony of the situation is palpable. The phone Vilutis gave to his victim—a tool to monitor, manage, and control her—was simultaneously a means for her to call for help if only she could marshal the courage. The control exercised by traffickers over their victims is that powerful.

Some traffickers have recognized, too, the power of global positioning satellite (GPS) capabilities, which are becoming common
on smart phones. The free GPS applications that allow law-abiding users to track down their friends at a coffee shop or restaurant become for traffickers a means of monitoring the precise location of their victims in real time. This Orwellian method of control is only the latest perversion of technology that makes trafficking easier for serial exploiters.

7

BREAKING THE BONDS THAT ENSLAVE VICTIMS

H
ow traffickers exert
such tight control over their victims is difficult to understand. Many victims, for example, spend a good deal of time out of physical reach of their traffickers. Yet their traffickers are able to control them very effectively even when they're in cars or hotel rooms with strangers who've paid to abuse them.

The Criminal Intelligence Service Canada has identified an arsenal of tactics used by sex traffickers to control their victims. Some—such as abduction, rape, forcible confinement, and assault—are direct. Even when the victim is temporarily away from the trafficker, the prospect of suffering a severe beating and the threat of future harm or even death is powerfully inhibiting. This is especially true if the victim already has endured a beating or injury in the past or knows someone else who has at the hands of the trafficker. In many cases, traffickers portray law enforcement officers as enemies to be avoided, further discouraging the victim from approaching them. The victim is also told that she herself is a criminal and should expect to be treated as such, or worse.

Indirect forms of coercion include controlling all aspects of the victim's life and threatening her family members should she turn on her abuser. Some traffickers have reportedly impregnated their victims to create a sense of “familial loyalty.”

“Nobody can get into the mindset of these girls,” says a police officer familiar with the techniques of traffickers. “How does an
average person relate to it? They can't. When I first came to this unit, I thought the same thing—what's wrong with these girls? Very quickly you learn they are forced to do this. They are victims.”

Listen to the words of Michelle, an underage Canadian girl who was recruited by traffickers and forced for weeks to provide sexual services to men:

I ran away once or twice at first, but he always caught me and forced me to go back. He would punch me, pull my hair… I wound up in this cheap motel room with dirty, smelly, disgusting clients coming in all day long. Then there were the sadistic ones who took pleasure in degrading and humiliating you… I threw up sometimes, it was so unbearable. When I did that I got punished. The guys [in the gang] wouldn't give me anything to eat: they would say, “That way, you won't throw up.” It got to the point where I was begging—not for food but for drugs, pills, anything. The best thing that could happen was for me to forget where I was, who I was… But clients don't like it when the girls are stoned. Some of them complained about me. I won't tell you how badly I got beat up after that.

Common tactics of traffickers and torturers

Government health policy analysts and international NGOs have compared the tactics used by traffickers—the direct force and indirect coercion to which they subject their victims—to methods of torture. Consider the abuse of Michelle and other victims described earlier in light of these definitions of torture prepared by Shared Hope International and the Polaris Project: